missizzy | Entries tagged with literature

IT people are suggesting either my computer's getting overheated or there's a compatibility issue. The components got checked for compatibility, so I think it's the former. I fear I didn't put enough thermal paste between the CPU and the fan; I put it on wrong initially, and lost a lot of the paste that had come with the fan in the process, and I did what I could with what was left, but maybe I needed more.
This evening I manage to write a short ficlet for one of the prompts for the upcoming Beauyasha week. I'll see if the Wildemount Wildlings miniseries gives me any ideas for more. I'm looking forward to it. Between Sam running it, Beauyasha as camp counselors, and Brennan Lee Mulligan as a struggling camper, this is likely to be fun fun fun!
I've been slowly reading my way through Richard Hinckley Allen's Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, a reprint of a historical astronomy text from 1899. Obviously behind the times on many aspects, but it's interesting in itself to see what they knew back then, and when they learned it. And it records enough history to leave you marveling at how long some star lore has persisted, especially when it's done so long enough for the stars in question to even change positions and routes in the sky, a process that takes literally thousands of years. And I'm still relatively early into the individual entries about the constellations, each with details on the highest-profile stars in them-and little literary quotes in the front. I reached Crux, the Southern Cross, this evening-where of course the quote chosen by Allen was ignored in favor of Crosby, Stills, and Nash playing in my head-and that by itself carries another sense of how much time has passed, since a song that is old to us wasn't written until over half a century after this book was published. Though Mr. Stills and Mr. Allen actually had very different opinions on how people will react to seeing said constellation for the first time; the latter claimed it actually wasn't very impressive!

For the past month, I have spent a large amount of time consuming three pieces of Critical Role-related media. And right now, I have mixed feelings on all three.
The moment last week when two bands of adventurers came together, and the entirety of this week's episode? Felt very much like the payoff of years of invested storytelling that it was. The seven people who suddenly had to be playing two people all rose to the occasion with aplomb, giving us all the interaction we would want from such a meeting, with the two remaining people at the table happily keeping up alongside them. That one's going to be a fan favorite, no doubt about it. But I have been getting more and more wary about how likely Bells Hells are to be idiots at the end of this, because I'm sorry, but the fact remains that releasing Predathos is an act of idiocy at best, and an act of arrogance at worst.
Were I to watch the new season The Legend of Vox Machina having never seen the original source material, I think I would unequivocally love it. Even the over the top moments like the end of episode seven are great when you watch with the right mindset. But I don't feel like I'm watching the adaptation of the original story we've all been waiting a year and a half for. I feel like I've had this season sold to me as something it's really not, and that's a problem. ( And that's when... )
I've also been listening to the audiobook of What Doesn't Break, and I'm currently in the middle of chapter 9. I'd be further, if the story wasn't often hard to get through; a large part of what's getting me through it is the knowledge that it's going to end with her meeting Imogen. And in that aspect of the novel Cassandra Khaw is proving a skilled author who's getting it right, aided in the audio version by a virtuoso performance from Marisha. But she is also turning Exandria into the kind of world you'd expect to see in some old fantasy paperback where women are hated and downtrodden the way they kind of haven't been at all in the rest of canon. In fact, it very much feels like she wanted to write a story about a lesbian (Laudna's in fact being bi is outright erased) in a hostile world, even when said world has also been shown to be way more queer-friendly than ours. It's to the point that I'm afraid I must hope we don't see any of Marquet besides the Taloned Highlands, because I would not trust this author with any non-Western coded society.
I suppose any or all of three of these things could soon end better than I'm currently anticipated. But I don't know.

Trying to get my San Diego Comic Con badges, and so far it's not looking terribly good at more than an hour's wait time, though at least it's moved a bit. Typing here to distract myself.
Whale Weekly finished this week. I am once again struck by how different Moby Dick reads to the modern reader, who is absolutely going to side with the whale at the end. Everything he did was perfectly justified as self-defense. He even gave the ship two chances to go away and leave him alone, sinking them only when they made clear they wouldn't stop until they killed him. Readers of old might debate whether Moby Dick was a metaphor for something, but such things tend to go over my head anyway, and it's not like he has to be. He reads perfectly plausibly as one rightfully pissed off whale. Still, you can be sorry that everyone on the ship died except the one guy whose husband managed to indirectly save him-but Queequeeg himself went down with the rest, and Ishmael will likely never be the same again.
Also finished the second act of Baldur's Gate last night. I spent much of one scene nervously wondering how I was going to make a certain wisdom save I'd seen one streamer expend all their inspiration to make-except my Tav then didn't have to. I assume she must have made some different choices from their Tav, and I can even guess what they were, but that felt weird. Meanwhile, I have grave doubts about the other big choice she had to make about who to side with, and meanwhile the battles are just getting harder. Also, the lag's getting bad again. At this point I'm just hoping I can get to the end without the game refusing to run entirely.
Still at more than an hour. Dammit.
ETA: Didn't get them.

It was certainly quite the Wimbledon to watch. From Andy Murray's farewell to the event, to the middle weekend upsets in the ladies, to Alcaraz further establishing a new potential dominance on the scene to Taylor Townsend coming back to win herself a doubles title, and after a bigger surprise in the men's doubles. I was also very happy to see Alfie Hewitt win his Wimbledon this morning. It feels kind of unreal to think the Olympics are only two weeks away!
Have now gotten through a selection of Veronica Franco's letters. They got to be repetitive after a while, especially as one became all too aware of how she probably felt the need to flatter all these rich and powerful men, upon whom her livelihood depended. I've also read the first of her capitola poems, which was a bit better.
We actually had work done on our air conditioning the last couple of weeks, and also directions for other things to make it work better, like getting all the grates unblocked. Much of this week, we didn't get the house that cool, but these past couple of days it's been outright cold at points! It's probably way better for our health that way. There are have been points where the air outside has been making my poor mother feel ill.
Panel schedule is out for Comic Con, and my sister has linked me to a spreadsheet to start putting my schedule on, though I've only settled on a few things so far, because there are too many choices. I'm hoping to see the inside of Hall H for the first time for the Rings of Power panel, though even if I do, I'll probably then ditch the Doctor Who panel to got to the Amazon animation one. I also want to do some gaming at some point this year.

I have started reading a volume of letters and poems by Veronica Franco. I'd heard about her, even seen a few minute's worth of Dangerous Beauty, which apparently was much more melodramatic than her real life story was, back in grade school, when a classmate did a presentation about courtesans in Renaissance Italy. So far, I've mainly been struck by how ridiculously elaborate her prose is. I haven't read enough Renaissance Italian writings to know how typical that is, but even so. Still, for all the flowery sentences and extra turns of phrase, I don't actually find her that hard to understand, which makes her an improvement on too many of the more elaborate prose writers I've read.
Have now made very real progress on Baldur's Gate 3, reaching the Underdark, and Shadowheart was right: it is a beautiful place, however dangerous and deadly. I am still not proving the best at figuring out things on my own while playing, but maybe I've gotten slightly better at navigating. I think I may even write fanfic at some point. I'm starting to understand why so many people write about their Tavs. Though the whole Lae'zel/Shadowheart dynamic intrigues me, too. Had them both in the party for the first time this week, and wow, were they chatty. Not at all friendly, but it's early goings yet.

It seems things have decided to continue to go wrong even when you'd think they'd leave off for a bit. We've had troubled with the dishwasher for years, but now it's stopped working all together. My sister's too, apparently, which at least means she's willing to go shopping for a new one next weekend. Meanwhile, this has caused my mother to resume her regular role of washing the dishes, though I still need to carry them to the sink and put them away afterwards.
Spent this weekend watching as much of Worlds as I could manage. Love Yuma Kagiyama's free skate, even if you can't really argue with Malinin beating him. But much as I also love Deanna Stellato-Dudek, I can't help but feel like she and Deschamps were home gifted the gold, that Miura & Kihira really should've repeated. My sister and I are probably going to go to Boston for Worlds next year, though likely not to all the events; those tickets cost *way* too much for that.
Also finished The Sea of Monsters. It's been over a decade since I read The Lightning Thief, and somewhere in the meanwhile I've picked up the unfortunate habit of being bothered when a book's prose is clearly aimed at someone younger, but Riordan's world-building continues to be good, and I do now kind of want to read the next one. My sister actually gifted it to me when she brought mom home, along with Candace Carty-William's Queenie, which is now next up.

My mom has now been home four days. She can walk, with the aid of a walker, but suffers enough unsteadiness that she needs to have someone around when she does to make sure she doesn't fall, which would be very bad indeed. I have spent the week teleworking and taking care of her, with my sister coming in to take care of the big things, particularly the ones that involve contacting other people and getting things out of them, since neither of us are good at that at all. I have learned this week how to make both coffee and tea (and am, I'm afraid, now even more revolted by the former than I was already) and how to boil eggs.
Make the house navigable for her also meant moving two of our book cases, and moving the books both in them and around them to wherever they were not immediately in the way. In the process, we've both had to face that our ten-thousand-item library collection really does need weeding. I'm not even sure how we do that when we don't have things like collection guidelines or numbers of checkouts to rely upon, but we'll have to figure it out. After she's able to walk on her own again.
She is showing a few signs of improvement. A therapist would no doubt improve that, but getting people in has stalled a bit. I'll be going back into the office on Monday, though even then I'll have to adjust my schedule at least temporarily, so my sister and I can take turns staying with her.
Still, I managed to finish my sister's Christmas gift to me, The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins, yesterday. It's a pretty good depiction of a possible outcome of climate catastrophe where humanity survives, but learns precious little. Also of generational trauma, and what happens when those who do wrong are not called to account, themes that feel even more relevant in our current times even outside the climate crisis. Also, the last page mentions a D&D character called Alludra. That could just be a coincidence, but hey.

So I've read some of the reactions to last night's episode of Critical Role, ( and I'm starting to wonder if I'm the only one who... )
I am currently nearly done with Anthony Trollope's The Macdermots of Ballycloran, which has very much been the First Novel He Wrote, with the kind of accompanying issues of putting together a compelling a story such works often suffer from. There are certainly much stronger moments in it as well. It perhaps says something that Trollope definitely exposes the evils of colonialism in it when, knowing as much as I do about him, he probably only partly realized he was doing so; he was good enough at observing and recording miseries, and recognizing their immediate cause, while still being blind as a Britisher of his time. ( Although it does rankle that... )
Quite excited about the upcoming Laudna novel. It'll be very nice indeed if it ends with her meeting Imogen-and the audiobook would of course allow us to literally hear that meeting with Marisha and Laura's voices. Though I'm still holding out hope for a Lord Estheross novel someday.

Dracula Daily has resumed. I considered unsubscribing, but didn't, and I'm glad of it now. If nothing else, it means I'm getting it in installments from the beginning this time; the first time around I subscribed a little bit in and had to catch up on the website.
But I'm genuinely a little surprised by how much it's showing up on my tumblr feed once again. People are finding new insights in the rereading, it seems. This might just become a yearly tradition.
And it's something of a singular phenomenon. Oh, they're doing other 19th century novels in email installments, too; I am finally reading through Moby Dick in its entirety two and a half decades after reading the an abridgement while spending my lunches hiding in my middle school library. And in its first days, one did see the posts about Ishmael and Queequeeg being a married couple-but the stereotyping there is so ridiculously painful, one can only enjoy it so much. And it's not caught on. It's the Dracula Daily and Dracula Daily only that will have this level of success, unless one of the others takes us by surprise.
I'm looking forward to meeting Mina again. First time around, the less than flattering descriptions of her as a character I'd read beforehand kept me from engaging with her at first. I'll try to avoid that this time.

My third dental appointment of recent weeks thankfully did not get any delays, and now I'm hopefully done with all that until June. My appointment with the TSA was hindered only slightly by their having technical difficulties, and hopefully by the end of next week I'll get it confirmed that I'm pre-checked for the next five years.
I have now gone from reading 1940s translation of Plato to 1940s translation of Aristotle. So far what of his writings I can understand I like better than I liked Plato, but there's still too much of it where I can't.
I followed the results of the World Figure Skating Championships most of the week's evenings, but between one thing and another I haven't watched any of it yet. Bit sad about some of the results, especially in the ice dance, but at least Knierim & Frazier didn't repeat. (I really do need to watch Miura & Kihira at some point, at the very least.)
The first week of spring had a chillier start and a rainier end. My sinus headaches were absolutely terrible early in the week, and they haven't gone away completely yet. Tomorrow was supposed to be prettier last time I checked...

After the dentist postponed my appointment right before I departed for it for the second time in a row, I finally got the top half of my mouth deep-cleaned Tuesday morning. The week and a half of anticipating it turned out to be the roughest part of it. It took a little less time than they said it would, and I didn't even have that much soreness afterwards-although between my sinuses and my uterus, I've spent much of the week on painkillers anyway. I go back next Friday-if they don't postpone that appointment too.
Also spent the week reading 1940s translation of Plato. The translation especially dated itself with the passages they chose from Symposium to present (if only because I've read that already), where they managed to erase the lesbianism from Aristophanes' story-but they didn't erase the homosexuality from his various writings, probably because that truly is impossible. But now I'm reading their selections from Republic, and finding I can't understand half of what I read, and am extremely unimpressed with the other half.
After a wild and crazy Critical Role episode last night, we were all thrown into morning today by the loss of Lance Reddick. But what's really struck me this evening is seeing the commemorations come from so many corners of the internet. He did a lot, this man did, and still we know he would have done so much more.

We ended up not holding a session Monday night. The DM continues to emphasize the danger of our current position, which is enough to make me very nervous indeed for next Monday.
Mom got a copy of Spare. She describes herself as extremely unimpressed with the way it's written, to the point that she might just be in favor of abolishing the monarchy after all, if this kind of book is what its people produce! Except she really likes Charles. She's read a biography of him recently that was apparently very nice to him. She initially suggested I could read it after her, but I suspect she's changed her mind over that.
Besides, at the moment I'm quite busy reading an anthology of Ancient Greek literature that was published all the way back in 1944. It starts with a few books of both The Iliad and The Odyssey, which I've mostly read already, but seeing how it was translated back in the day is still kind of interesting.

I finished reading James Owen's Danger UXB this morning. A book about bomb disposal during the Blitz is certainly a timely thing to be reading right now, and it brought home some of that horror, especially since it was the early days of bomb disposal, when personnel didn't really know what they were doing and got killed a lot more as a result. Mom has praised the 70s TV series and I believe we even have it on DVD, but I don't know if I'll watch. I've been reading on a bit of a theme lately; next up in a biography of Clementine Churchill I found for less than a dollar in Old Town a couple of weeks ago.
I've also been watching the Sagas of Sundry over the last couple of weeks, getting myself ready, perhaps, for the upcoming jenga tower of questions debuting on Tuesday. I'd heard a lot about Madness especially, that praised series that for a long time was no longer available to view unless you knew someone with the files, but I hadn't really known how hard and heavy it was. Ivan van Norman is an absolutely terrifying storyteller, and I do hope he and the players talked beforehand about how far he was going to push them and in what ways.

Up until a few minutes ago it was snowing outside, and now it's turned to rain, with maybe some snow still mixed in. My throat is still mildly sore, though after the temperature drop, I'm just relieved it didn't get worse overnight.
I finished The Grand Master of Demonic Cultivation last week. In translation, at least, it had the odd feel of being like a fanfic, which stands as proof that said genre has really developed its own prose style. Of course, I can really only confirm that for English-language fic, and the translator for this book, who has gone at least one of MXTX's other novels, might have simply known who the target audience was. It also made the episodes of The Untamed I've seen so far make a lot more sense, establishing the world the story takes place in and its rules much more clear, although that may be because the translation's also aimed at readers who might not be too familiar with Xianxia/Danmei and its tropes.
Since then I've also read most of John Preston's The Dig,, which mom gave to me after I mentioned watching the Netflix movie. Though honestly, I think the movie might be better, even if some might criticize it having more dramatics than the book.
Though things have gotten to the point where when while watching said movie, there was a scene featuring a character on a crowded English train, and I had a moment where I briefly wondered why noone was masked, before remembering this took place in 1939.

I've been reading my way slowly through Giocomo Leopardi's Pensieri. These dark musings on human nature are from the early 19th century, but feel shockingly modern. It's brought me back to a line I wrote once myself: that the worst things were those that never changed, and this lists a good number of them. Not that I think Leopardi's right about everything, but even on the ones where his assertions are debatable or even dubious, you can understand why someone either then or now might believe them.
And with the 4th of July and the Delta variant both looming, I will likely be staying inside as much as possible these next two weeks, so today I got ambitious and took the trip to Tyson's Corner Center for the first time since long before the pandemic. I came home with three books I'd been wanting to get for a while: Phillip Pullman's Serpentine, Madeleine Miller's The Song of Achilles and Layla Saad's Me and White Supremacy. I'd already checked out the last on the public library Overdrive, but you need a permanent copy to work through it properly. Now I just need to figure out when I'm going to read the first two, although the first is pretty short.
Also another set of RPG dice. I may need to keep a close eye on my developing habit of buying those.

I have now read through most of Blackened White. I have a complicated relationship with poetry, often struggling with it when it's more arty and abstract. But this is the kind of poetry I am very good with, probably because it's very direct. Also very blunt and raw at times; Brian pulled no punches with this book, and that makes it feel very real. And then one of them catches you by surprise with how smart and observant their writer happens to be. (Though there have been times reading it I've been kind of amazed that this was his now fiancee's first introduction to him. Talk about knowing a guy's skeletons first.)
Finished the Awesome Ladies entry, and then had quite a time trying to get auphonic.com to work for me to get it to the requested volume. Though I may or may not try to make further use of that website in the future, especially having learned just a little bit from my first attempt with it.
The ads I hear on Spotify now include a PSA from VA's Department of Health urging us all to wear masks. A bit late for that, maybe, but hey.

Current Music: Beatles - Blackbird

I am now halfway through episode 89 of Vox Machina. Episode 88 was another hard to watch one, especially with the cast clearly not enjoying themselves, and the first part of episode 89, while brilliantly done, hurts more when you know how that story's ultimately going to end. Also a little nerve-wracking to have watched it while anticipating the Mighty Nein's encounter with the Tomb Takers for the second week in a row. Although I suppose you can't really blame Matt for delaying that if they recorded it the night of November 5. At least we're getting Narrative Telephone again first. They really are making our heads spin with the question of what the hell Brian did.
I have also started to read The Queen of Attolia. I read The Thief for a Greek mythology in literature class a number of years ago, and liked that, but so far, I am very wary about where this second book in the series is going.

Is anyone else getting to the point where if they go outside, come back in, and don't go and wash their hands immediately, they actually feel uncomfortable and unwashed? These things really do get to be habitual.
My copy of The World of Critical Role shipped yesterday. It's coming by UPS, and their website is claiming it'll arrive today! I'll believe that when I see it, though. Though if not, I'm currently still in the middle of reading a collection of speculative short stories by authors of colour called New Suns. Mom got it for an online literature course she's taken, but she's never been good at reading genre pieces, so she gave it to me to read instead. Most of them run pretty dark, but I've been very impressed by the creativity most of them have contained.

Just finished reading Hidden Figures. The second book I've read this year where reading it left me much less impressed with the movie adaptation I'd already seen. Though ultimately, I suppose it's better the movie exists, if only because far fewer people would know about the black women of 50s/60s NASA if it hadn't been made. But the real story, which is a much longer one starting in World War II and going from there, is far richer and more impressive. Though I admit my eyes might have glazed over during all the paragraphs about the technical information these women were working on. Arguably that just enforces how remarkable their work was. The history, of both civil rights and space exploration covered also brings you back to that exciting time, and makes you sad about all that's happened since.
The weather's nice enough I'll likely walk in Old Town today-if I don't suffer from too hard a headache from these temperature fluctuations! And then a cold snap that makes me hope I won't have to spend too much of my commute outside for the rest of the week.